Magic Seeds

FIVE. DEEPER IN THE FOREST

HE GOT TO his base — it had been his and Bhoj Narayan’s, his commander — late the next afternoon. It was a half-tribal or quarter-tribal village deep in the forest and so far not touched by police action; it was a place where he might truly rest, if such rest was possible for him now.

He arrived at what some people still called the hour of cow-dust, the hour when in the old days a cattle boy (hired for a few cents a day by the village) drove the village cattle home in a cloud of dust, and the golden light of early evening turned that sacred dust to soft, billowing gold. There were no cattle boys now; there were no landowners to hire them. The revolutionaries had put an end to that kind of feudal village life, though there were still people who needed to have their cattle looked after, and there were still little boys who pined to be hired for the long, idle day. But the golden light at this time of day was still considered special. It lit up the open forest all around, and for a few minutes made the white mud walls and the thatch of the village huts and the small scattered fields of mustard and peppers look well cared for and beautiful: like a village of an old fairy tale, restful and attractive to come upon, but then full of menace, with dwarves and giants and tall wild forest growth and men with axes and children being fattened in cages.

This village was for the time being under the control of the movement. It was one of a number of headquarters villages and was subject to something like a military occupation by the guerrillas. They were noticeable in their thin olive uniforms and peaked caps with a red star: trousers-people, as the tribals respectfully called them, and with guns.

Willie had a room in a commandeered long hut. He had a traditional four-poster string bed, and he had learned like a villager to store small objects between the rafters (of trimmed tree branches) and the low thatch. The floor, of beaten earth, was bound and made smooth with a mixture of mud and cow-dung. He had got used to it. The hut for some months had become a kind of home. It was where he returned after his expeditions; and it was an important addition to the list he carried in his head of places he had slept in, and was able to count (as was his habit) when he felt he needed to get hold of the thread of his life. But now the hut had also become a place where, without Bhoj Narayan, he was horribly alone. He was glad to have got there, but then, almost immediately, he had become restless.

The rule of privacy, of not saying too much about oneself and not inquiring into people’s circumstances in the world outside, which had been laid down during his first night in the camp in the teak forest, that rule still held.

He knew only about the man in the room next to his. This man was dark and fierce and with big eyes. When he was a child or in his teens he had been badly beaten up by the thugs of some big landlord, and ever since then he had been in revolutionary movements in the villages. The first of those movements, historically the most important, had faded away; the second had been crushed; and now, after some years of hiding, he was on his third. He was in his mid or late forties, and no other style of life was possible for him. He liked tramping through villages in his uniform, browbeating villagers, and talking of revolution; he liked living off the land, and this to some extent meant living off village people; he liked being important. He was completely uneducated, and he was a killer. He sang dreadful revolutionary songs whenever he could; they contained the sum of his political and historical wisdom.

He told Willie one day, “Some people have been in the movement for thirty years. Sometimes on a march you may meet one, though they are hard to find. They are skilled at hiding. But sometimes they like to come out and talk to people like us and boast.”

Willie thought, “Like you.”

And repeatedly during the evening of his return, hearing the man next door singing his revolutionary songs again and again (the way some boys at Willie’s mission school used to sing hymns), Willie thought, “Perhaps some feeling of purpose will come back to me.”

Once or twice during the night he got up and went outside. There were no outhouses; people just used the forest. There were no lights in the village. There was no moon. He was aware of the sentries with guns. He gave the password, and then a little while later he had to give it again, so that as he walked he felt the strange word “comrade” echoing about him, as question and reassurance. The forest was black, and full of sound: sudden wing-beating, amid cries of alarm and pain from birds and other creatures, calling for help that wouldn’t come.

Willie thought, “The most comforting thing about life is the certainty of death. There is no way now for me to pick my way back to the upper air. Where was the upper air? Berlin? Africa? Perhaps there is no upper air. Perhaps that idea has always been a mirage.”

In the morning someone knocked on the door of Willie’s room and came in before Willie answered. The man who came in carried an AK-47. He was as pale as Einstein, but much smaller, about five feet. He was very thin, with a skeletal but handsome face and bony, nervous hands. Another six or seven inches would have given him an immense presence.

He said, “My name is Ramachandra. I am a unit commander. Your unit commander now. You are no longer a courier. We have received instructions that you are to be admitted into my unit. You have proved yourself. Today or tomorrow we will be having a section meeting to discuss the new situation. The meeting will be here or somewhere else. I don’t know as yet. You must hold yourself ready to start marching this evening.”

He had small, hard, mad eyes. He fingered his gun with his bony fingers all the time he spoke. And then, attempting another kind of style, he turned abruptly and walked out of the room.

Like Einstein, Ramachandra was a man of an upper caste, perhaps the highest. Such people were having a hard time in the world outside; populist governments had set up all kinds of barriers against them since independence; many of them, fearing slow impoverishment at home, were now migrating to the United States, Australia, Canada, England. Ramachandra and Einstein were doing something else. Within the movement, they were embracing their persecutors. Willie, with his mixed background — his upper-caste father, placid, inactive, with a strain of asceticism, always expecting things to work out; his more fiery mother, many stages down, wishing to seize the world — Willie understood these men very well.

He thought, “I thought I had left all of this behind. But now it’s all here, just as it was, leaping out at me. I have been around the world, but still it’s here.”

THERE WAS NO night march through the forest for Willie, to his great relief. The section meeting was held in the village where he was. They assembled all the next day, arriving not in various disguises, as they did in the town, but in uniform; and in a great show of fellowship they ate the simple village food, peppery lentils and flat bread made of millet.

Einstein came. Willie had been fearing to meet him again, but now, after Ramachandra, Willie was ready to forgive the malevolence in his eyes and even ready to think that Einstein had softened.

There also came the leader of the camp in the teak forest, who all that time before had sent Willie with Bhoj Narayan to the street of the tanners. He was smooth and civil, even seductive, with wonderful manners, speaking softly and yet careful in his intonations, like an actor. Willie had mentally put him in a grey double-breasted suit and made him a university teacher or a civil servant in the world outside. Wondering what had driven a man apparently so complete to the guerrillas and their hard life in the bush, Willie, following some kind of instinct, had seen him as a man tormented by the infidelities of his wife. Willie had later thought: “I wasn’t making it up. I saw that because for some reason he wanted me to see it. It was the message he was transmitting to me.” Now, meeting the man again after two years, still seeing the far-off pain in his eyes, Willie thought, adhering half in a joke to his first assessment, “Poor fellow. With that awful wife.” And treated him like that right through.

The meeting was in Ramachandra’s hut. It began at about ten; that was the usual time for these section meetings. There was a pressure lamp. In the beginning it roared and was dazzling; then it settled down to a hum, and became duller and duller. Brown jute sacking had been spread on the earth floor, and over the sacking there were cotton sheets and blankets, with pillows and bolsters.

The civil man, the leader at the camp in the teak forest, gave the news. It was very bad. Much more had been lost than the men in the railway colony. They were only part of one squad, and three full squads had been wiped out by the police. All the weapons that had been assembled piece by piece over a year had been lost. That was a loss of many hundreds of thousands of rupees, and there had been nothing to show for it.

The leader said, “In a war losses have to be digested. But these losses are exceptional, and we have to rethink our strategy. We have to give up our plan to take the war to the small towns at the fringe of our liberated areas. It was perhaps too ambitious at this stage. Though it should be said that in war ambition sometimes pays off. We will, of course, start up again in those places, or places like them. But that’s in the future.”

Einstein said, “The poison of Kandapalli’s teaching is responsible for what has happened. The idea of organising the people through the people sounds pretty, and people abroad will applaud it. But we who know the reality know that the peasants have to be disciplined before they can become foot soldiers of the revolution. You have to rough them up a little bit.”

A dark man said, “How can you talk like this when you yourself are of a peasant family?”

Einstein said, “That’s why I talk as I do. I never hide what I come from. There is no beauty in the peasant. That is Kandapalli’s teaching. He is a man of a high caste, though he suppresses his caste suffix. He is wrong because this movement is not a movement of love. No revolution can be a movement of love. If you ask me, I will tell you that the peasants ought to be kept in pens.”

Somebody else said, “How can you talk in this cruel way when people like Shivdas serve the movement so loyally?”

Einstein said, “Shivdas is loyal because he needs us. He wants people in the village to see how close we are to him. He uses our friendship to terrorise the villagers. Shivdas is very black and very thin and he gives us his bedroom and he talks revolution and land redistribution. But he is a crook and a thug. The big landowners and the old feudal officials have run away. There is no policeman or surveyor in his village, and every year Shivdas reaps many acres of other people’s crops and ploughs many acres of other people’s land. If people didn’t think we were with him they would have killed him long ago. The day Shivdas thinks it will serve him better he will betray us to the police. The revolutionary has at all times to be clear-sighted, and to understand the poor human material he might have the misfortune to work with. If Commander Bhoj Narayan hadn’t been led astray by our African friend we wouldn’t have had the calamity we have come here to discuss.”

People looked at Willie. Ramachandra’s eyes were hard.

The man acting as chairman, the leader of the camp in the teak forest, and clearly now the section leader, said to Willie, “I think you should have the opportunity to say something.”

Willie said, “The commander is right. I feel responsible. I feel especially responsible for what happened to Bhoj Narayan. He was my friend. I wish to say that too.”

Einstein looked appeased. And there was a general relaxation in the meeting. Self-criticism was part of these meetings. When it came quickly it had a good effect: it bonded people together.

The leader said, “Chandran has spoken generously. I think he should be commended for that.”

Gradually, then, through many interruptions, through inquiries about the loss of the squads and the arms, and the arrest of Bhoj Narayan, and through long discussions about the nature of the peasantry as compared with the nature of the urban proletariat (a favourite topic), the leader came to the new strategy that the movement had decided on.

The section leader said, “We will give up taking the war to the small towns, as I said. Instead, we will push deeper into the forest. Each section will take over a hundred and fifty villages. We will administer these villages, and we will announce that we have expanded the liberated areas. This will help with the loss of morale. It will not be easy. It will be hard, but it is the way ahead.”

The meeting ended after three hours. Long before then they had said what they wanted to say. They began to repeat things. They began to say “Personally I feel” or “I very much feel,” to add passion to what they had said before; it was a sign they were flagging. The pressure lamp itself gradually dimmed; and then could not be pumped higher.

Afterwards — the pressure lamp fading fast to its limp brown mantle, the meeting breaking up, some people hanging around for a few last words, but standing now (in bare feet or olive socks) on the sheets and sacking and amid the pillows and bolsters where they had been sitting, others recovering their boots from the many boots at the doorway, and then picking their way with flashlights to their huts, the flashlights making the forest bigger and the surrounding night blacker — afterwards Einstein came to Willie just before he left the hut and said in a neutral voice, “The weaver-caste man went to the police, didn’t he?”

Willie said, “It looks like it.”

“He paid the price. So I suppose the police will get Bhoj Narayan under Section 302. Did people see?”

Willie said, “The brother.”

Einstein’s eyes became far away. A second or two later he blinked, gave a little nod as if acknowledging something, and pressed his lips: a man filing away information.

Willie thought, “I hope I haven’t made another mistake.”

WITHIN A MONTH there began the push deeper into the forest to extend the liberated area. Every squad was given its own route, the list of villages it had to occupy and re-educate. Sometimes two squads might for a stretch follow the same route, and sometimes, exceptionally, two or three squads might camp together for a short time in one of the larger villages. Only people at the top knew how the squads were deployed and what the strategy was; only they knew the extent of the new liberated area. Everybody else took the hard campaign on trust: the long marches in the forest, the poor food and bad water, the days spent among nervous, passive villagers and tribal people, who (prepared by a tough “warm-up” group that had been sent on ahead) from time to time were assembled and made to speak of their “problems,” or simply clapped their hands and sang village songs. The squad leader, if he could, might offer a solution to the problems that he had heard about. If he couldn’t, he spoke (always in the same simple words and slogans) of the idea and promise of the liberated area; he laid down a few of the new rules, and the people’s new loyalties. And then the squad marched on, with a promise to return in some months, to see how people were getting on with their new gift of freedom.

It was a strange time for Willie, a step down into yet another kind of life: patternless labour, without reward or goal, without solitude or companionship, without news of the outside world, with no prospect of letters from Sarojini, with nothing to anchor himself to. In the beginning he had tried to hold on to his idea of time, his idea of the thread of his life, in his old way, counting the beds he had slept in since he was born (like Robinson Crusoe marking each day with a notch on a piece of wood, as he had thought, going back to one of the books of his mission school). But that counting of beds had become harder and harder with the undifferentiated days of marching, the villages almost all the same. Many months had passed since the life of marching and camping had begun; perhaps a year, perhaps more. What had been painful in the beginning, stretching out the days, had become habit. He felt his memory slipping, like time now, and with that slipping of memory the point of the mental exercise disappeared. It became too strenuous, too frustrating; it caused his head to hurt. He gave it up; it was like shedding a piece of himself.

In the squad the nearest thing to companionship was with Ramachandra, the commander. What separated Willie from the rest of the squad was what attracted Ramachandra.

One day they were resting in the forest. A villager and his wife passed by, the woman with a bundle on her head. The villager greeted Willie and Ramachandra. Willie called back, “Are you going far?” The man said they were going on a visit to some relations many miles away. Then with a smile he said, “If I had a camera I would give you a good memory of this moment. ‘Lost in the woods.’” And he laughed.

Ramachandra was at once on his guard. He asked Willie, “Are they mocking us?”

Willie said, “No, no. He was only being friendly. Though I must say I’ve never heard a villager making such an elaborate joke. He didn’t just say we looked lost, which was all that he meant. He brought in the camera, for the joke. He probably got it from a film.”

After the villager and his wife had passed Ramachandra said, “They say that your father is a temple priest. An upper-caste man. If that is true, why are you here? Why aren’t you in England or the United States? That’s where many of my relations are.”

Willie outlined his life in England, Africa and Berlin. In the forest the very names were full of dazzle, even when Willie (not wishing to arouse jealousy and careful not to overdo the personal drama) talked of failure and humiliation and hiding. Ramachandra showed no jealousy. His eyes softened. He wanted to hear more. It was as though Willie, in those far-off places, was experiencing for him as well. And from time to time thereafter, but never too often, and never wishing to appear too friendly, he sought Willie out to talk of far-off things.

About two weeks later he said, “I was not like you. You are middle class. I was a country boy. I was poor. But you must understand. When I was poor and in the country I wasn’t thinking all the time that I was poor. That’s what a lot of people in the movement don’t understand. When I was in the country I used to think that our life was just a regular kind of life. I used to graze cattle with a low-caste boy, a harijan, as people said in those days. Imagine: grazing cattle and not thinking anything of it. The harijan boy used to come home with me sometimes. My father didn’t mind. He thought the boy was ambitious and he thought that was what mattered in people. My mother didn’t mind either, but she refused point blank to wash any cup or glass the boy used. So I washed any glass or cup the boy used. I wonder if the boy knew. You know what happened to him? He was ambitious — my father was right. He is a senior teacher now, that boy, as oily as a paratha and as fat as a barrel. And I am here.”

Willie, thinking hard, as though there were still any number of traps he had to avoid with Ramachandra, said, “He is where he wants to be. You are where you want to be.”

Ramachandra said, “It was only when I went to the town, to go to a college, that I understood how poor we were. You are used to seeing me in uniform. But when I first went to the town I used to wear a long shirt and pyjama. Our politicians make a point of wearing country clothes, to show how much they care for the common man, but for true country people those clothes can be a cause for shame. When I first went to the town I was ashamed of my clothes all the time. My college friends noticed. They were richer than me. Or let’s say they had a little more money than me. They took me to a tailor and had a suit stitched for me. Two or three days later we went to the shop and they helped me put the suit on. I could hardly believe it when I looked down at myself. All that fine cloth. I wondered whether I would ever have the courage to go out into the street wearing all that cloth. It’s not so easy now to remember those first few moments of wearing a suit — I’ve got so used to it. Then the tailor asked me to look at myself in the long mirror. That was another shock. The country boy had vanished. A city man was looking at me. But then something unexpected happened. I became full of sexual rage. I was a city man. I had a city man’s needs. I wanted a girl. But no girl would look at me.”

Willie considered the pale, pared-down, handsome face set on the thin, small body, still not much more than the body of the small boy grazing cattle in the village. The body seemed to mock the beauty of the face, to render it null; the eyes that could appear so hard were really also full of pain.

Willie said, “All of us from the subcontinent have trouble with sex. We are too used to our parents and families arranging it for us. We can’t do it for ourselves. If I didn’t have that trouble I wouldn’t have married the girl I did. I wouldn’t have gone to Africa and wasted eighteen years of her life and mine. If I had been easier about sex, if I had known how to go out and get it, I would have been another kind of man. My possibilities would have been endless. I can’t even begin to work them out. But without that talent I was doomed. I could get only what I got.” Ramachandra said, “It was better than what I got.” Willie, picking up just a hint of jealousy in Ramachandra’s eyes, thought it better to let the subject drop.

And it was Ramachandra who, in a roundabout way, returned to the topic many days later, when they were on the march.

He said, “What books did you read when you were young?” Willie said, “I had a lot of trouble with the books we were told to read. I tried reading The Vicar of Wakefield. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t know who those people were, or why I was reading about them. I couldn’t relate it to anything I knew. Hemingway, Dickens, Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan—I had the same trouble with them and all the others. In the end I had the courage to stop reading them. The only things I understood and liked were fairy stories. Grimm, Hans Andersen. But I didn’t have the courage to tell my teachers or my friends.”

Ramachandra said, “My college teacher asked me one day — I was already a trousers-man, I should tell you—‘Haven’t you read The Three Musketeers?’ When I said no, he said, ‘You’ve missed half your life.’ I looked hard for that book. It wasn’t an easy book to find in our small town. What a let-down it was! I didn’t know where I was or who those people in costume were. And you know what I thought? I thought my teacher — he was an Anglo-Indian — had said that thing about missing half my life because his teacher had said the same thing to him. I felt that thing about the Musketeers had come down the generations, from schoolteacher to schoolteacher, and nobody had told them to stop. Do you know what was easy for me, what I could understand right away and relate to my needs? Lenin, Marx, Trotsky, Mao. I had no trouble with them at all. I didn’t find them abstract. I gobbled them up. The only thing I could read apart from that were the Mills and Boon books.”

Willie said, “Love stories for girls.”

“That’s why I read them. I read them for the language, the conversation. I thought they would teach me how to approach girls at the college. I felt that because of my background I didn’t have the correct language. I couldn’t talk about films and music. A certain kind of language leads to a certain kind of talk and then sexual experience — that was what I thought. So after classes I would go home and read my Mills and Boon and learn passages by heart. I would practise this language on the girls in the cafeteria at the college. They would laugh. One girl didn’t laugh. But after a while she got up and went off with the boy she was waiting for. She had been using me as a convenience. I hated that girl especially. I became full of sexual rage, as I told you. I wished I had stayed in my country clothes and never left my village. I wished I had never allowed my friends to put me in a suit. That rage grew and grew. I began to feel I was sitting on a spring. It was that rage that led me to the movement. Somebody from the movement at the college preached hatred of girls. He preached it as a kind of new moralism. He used to say, ‘The first sacrifice is your sexuality, comrade.’ Others said the same thing. I heard them say that the revolutionary was really an ascetic and a saint. The ascetic is very much in our tradition, and I was attracted to it. It is something I preach myself to our squad. I have killed two people who went against the teaching. I killed a man who raped a tribal girl, and I killed a man whom I saw fondling a village boy. I didn’t ask him for any explanations. I stripped that second fellow of all identification and left his body for the villagers to dispose of as they wished.”

Willie noticed how unwilling Ramachandra was in any account of his sexual unhappiness to acknowledge his small size. He talked of everything else: his background, his clothes, his language, the village culture; but he left out what was obvious and most important. It was like the self-criticism sessions they had at formal meetings, where truth was often what was evaded, as Willie himself had evaded the truth when talking about the arrest of Bhoj Narayan and the loss of his squad. Willie admired Ramachandra for not complaining of his size, for the pretence that as a man he was like others, able to talk of more general issues. But no amount of concealment, no amount of sympathy, could do away with Ramachandra’s grief and incompleteness. And often, when he saw the fine-featured man asleep, Willie was full of affection for him.

Willie thought, “When I first saw Bhoj Narayan I saw him as a thug. But then I became friendly with him and lost that vision. When I first saw Ramachandra, handling his gun with his small bony hands, I saw him as a killer and a fanatic. Now already I am losing that vision of him. In this effort of understanding I am losing touch with myself.”

On another day Ramachandra asked Willie, “Why did you leave your wife?”

Willie said, “I was in Africa. A Portuguese colony on its last legs. I had been there for eighteen years. My wife was from that colony. I was living in her big house and on her land, twenty times more land than anyone here has. I had no job. I was just her husband. For many years I thought of myself as lucky. Living where I did — very far from home: India was the last place I wanted to be — and in that high colonial style. Because you must understand I was poor, literally without money, and when I met my wife in London, at the end of my useless college course, I had no idea at all what I might do or where I might go. After fifteen or sixteen years in Africa I began to change. I began to feel that I had thrown away my life, that what I had thought of as my luck was no such thing. I began to feel that all I was doing was living my wife’s life. Her house, her land, her friends, nothing that was my own. I began to feel that because of my insecurity — the insecurity I had been born into, like you — I had yielded too often to accidents, and that these accidents had taken me further and further away from myself. When I told my wife I was leaving her because I was tired of living her life, she said something very strange. She said it wasn’t really her life. I have been thinking of that in the past two years, and I believe now that what my wife was saying was that her life was as much a series of accidents as I thought mine was. Africa, the Portuguese colony, her grandfather, her father. At the time I saw it only as a rebuke, and I was in no mood to accept it. I thought she was saying that my life with her had given me strength and spirit and knowledge of the world: these were her gifts to me, and I was now using them to spoil her life. If I had thought she meant what I now believe she did, I would have been very moved, and I might never have left her. That would have been wrong. I had to leave her, to face myself.”

Ramachandra said, “I feel that everything about my birth and life was an accident.”

Willie thought, “That is how it is with all of us. Perhaps men can live more planned lives where they are more masters of their destiny. Perhaps it is like that in the simplified world outside.”

THEY CAME TO a village which was unlike the villages or forest settlements they had been marching through for the past year. This village would have been the seat of a small feudal lord in the old days. A tax-farmer, Ramachandra said: the collector of the forty or fifty kinds of tax these wretched villagers had had to pay in the old days: the virtual owner of twenty or thirty or more villages. The big house, too grand for the setting, was still there on the outskirts of the village. It was empty now, but (out of old respect, perhaps, or fear of malign spirits) no squatters had moved in, and all over the whole spreading complex — the front vestibule, the brick-paved courtyards, the suites of now doorless rooms — there was the damp, dead, tainted smell of the rotting masonry of a long-abandoned mansion. This smell came from bats and their accumulated, cushiony droppings, and from colonising pigeons and wilder birds who had left a crust of white, gritty splashes on the walls, splash upon splash upon splash. It would have been a distasteful labour to clear the house of what bats and birds had left behind, but even then it would have taken a long time, if the house were repeopled, to give it the smell of human life again.

For a long way outside the village the lord’s lands could still be seen: overgrown fields, unirrigated and dried up, untended orchards of lemons and sweet limes with long, straggly branches, acacia and neem growing everywhere.

Ramachandra said, “These villagers can make you want to cry. Most of them don’t have land, and for three years at least we’ve been trying to get them to take over these six hundred acres. We’ve held any number of meetings with them. We’ve told them about the wickedness of the rule of the old days. They agree with all of that, but when we tell them that it is up to them now to take over and plough these acres, they say, ‘It’s not our land.’ We will talk for two hours and they will appear to agree with you, but then at the end they will say again, ‘It’s not our land.’ You can get them to clean out water tanks. You can get them to build roads. But you can’t get them to take over land. I begin to see why revolutions have to turn bloody. These people will begin to understand the revolution only when we start killing people. They will have no trouble understanding that. We have started at least three revolutionary committees in this village and in many of the others. They have all faded away. The young men who join us want blood. They have been to high school. Some even have degrees. They want blood, action. They want the world to change. All we give them is talk. That is Kandapalli’s legacy. They see nothing happening and they drop out. If we were ruling the liberated areas with an iron hand, as we should, we would have all those six hundred acres cleared and ploughed in a month. And people would have had some idea of what the revolution means. We have to do something this time. We’ve heard that the family of the old tax-collector is trying to sell this land. They ran away at the time of the first rebellion and they have been living in some city or other ever since. Living in the old parasitic way, doing nothing. Now they are poor. They want to sell this land in some shady deal to a rich local farmer, a kind of Shivdas figure. He lives about twenty miles away. We are determined to prevent this deal. We want the land to be occupied by the villagers, and it looks as though this time we will have to kill some people. I think we will have to leave some people behind here to enforce our will. This is where Kandapalli has been undermining us. Crying for the poor, hardly able to finish a sentence, impressing everybody, and doing nothing.”

They came to the lord’s house. It was two storeys high and the outer wall was blank. The vestibule went through the lower floor of the house. On either side of the vestibule was a high platform two or three feet wide set into an alcove in the thick wall. Here, in the old days, the doormen would have watched or slept or smoked water pipes and simpler visitors would have waited. This style of house — courtyards alternating with suites of rooms with a central passageway, so that it was possible from the front to see down a tunnel of light and shade right through to the back — this style of house would have been an ancient way of building here. Many farmers had simpler versions of the big house. It spoke of a culture that, in this respect at least, was still itself; and Willie, in the foul smell of the half-rotten big house, found himself moved by this unexpected little vision that had been granted him of his country. The past was terrible; it had to be done away with. But the past also had a kind of wholeness that people like Ramachandra couldn’t begin to care about and couldn’t replace.

It was as Ramachandra had prophesied at the village meeting the next evening. They came respectfully in their short turbans and in their loincloths long or short and in their long shirts, and they listened and looked wise. The uniformed men of the movement let their guns be seen, as Ramachandra had ordered. Ramachandra himself looked impatient and hard and tapped his bony fingers on his AK-47.

“There are five hundred or six hundred acres here. A hundred of you could take over five acres each and start ploughing, start bringing it back to fertility.”

They made a kind of collective sigh, as though that was something they longed for. And yet, when Ramachandra questioned people individually, the reply was only, “The land is not ours.”

He said to Willie afterwards, “You see how fine old manners and fine old ways equip people for slavery. It’s the ancient culture our politicians talk about. But there is something else. I understand these people because I am one of them. I just have to pull a little switch in my head and I know exactly what they are feeling. They accept that some people are rich. They don’t mind that at all. Because these rich people are not like them. The people like them are poor, and they are determined that the poor shall remain poor. When I tell them to take ten acres each, do you know what they are thinking? They are thinking, ‘I don’t want Srinivas to get ten acres of land. It will make him intolerable. Better if I don’t get ten acres if it prevents Srinivas and Raghava from getting ten more acres.’ Only the gun can bring revolution. I am thinking that this time we will have to leave half a squad here to bring them to their senses.”

That evening he said to Willie, “I feel we are always taking one step forward and then two steps back, and the government is always there waiting for us to fail. There are some people in the movement who have been in all the rebellions and have spent thirty years doing what we do. They are people who really don’t want anything to happen now. For them revolution and hiding and knocking on villagers’ doors and asking for food and shelter for the night has become a way of life. We have always had our hermits wandering about the forest. It’s in our blood. People applaud us for it, but it’s got us nowhere.”

He was becoming wild, passion overcoming the regard he had for Willie, and Willie was glad when they separated for the night.

Willie thought, “They all want the old ways to go. But the old ways are part of people’s being. If the old ways go people will not know who they are, and these villages, which have their own beauty, will become a jungle.”

They left behind three men of the squad, to talk about the need to plough the lord’s land.

Ramachandra, more philosophical this morning, like a cat that has abruptly forgotten its rage, said, “They won’t do anything.”

A mile out of the village young men began to come out of the forest. They walked in step with the squad. There was no mockery in them.

“Our recruits,” Ramachandra said. “You see. High school boys. As I told you. For them we are a vision of the life they once had. But they didn’t have the money to stay on in the small town they went to for their education. We are for them what the London-returned and America-returned boys were for you. We will let them down, and I feel it is better to let them go at this stage.”

At noon they rested.

Ramachandra said, “I haven’t told you why I joined the movement. The reason is actually very simple. You know about the college boys who befriended me in the town and bought a suit for me. There was a teacher at that college who for some reason was very nice to me. When I got my diploma I thought I should do something in return for him. You know what I thought? Please don’t laugh. I thought I should ask him to dinner. It was something that was always happening in the Mills and Boon books. I asked him whether he would like to have dinner with me. He said yes, and we fixed a date. I didn’t know what to do about that dinner. It tormented me. I had never given anyone dinner. A crazy idea came to me. There was a rich family in the town. They were small industrialists, making pumps and things like that. Dazzling to me. I didn’t know these people, but I took my courage in both hands and went to their big house. I put on my suit, the one that had given me so much joy and pain. You can imagine the cars in the drive, the lights, the big verandah. People were coming and going, and no one noticed me at the beginning. Halfway down the drawing room there was the kind of bar that people in these modern houses have. No one was paying me too much attention, with all the crush, and I felt that I could even sit at the bar and ask the bow-tied servant for a drink. He was the only one I felt I could talk to. I didn’t ask him for a drink. I asked him who the owner of the house was. He pointed him out to me, sitting on an open side verandah with other people. Sitting out in the cool night air. A sturdy rather than plump middle-aged man with thin hair smoothed back. With my heart in my boots, as the saying is, I went to the verandah and said to the great man, in the presence of all the people there, ‘Good evening, sir. I am a student at the college. Professor Coomaraswamy is my teacher, and he has sent me to you with a request. He very much would like to have dinner with you on — I gave the date — if you are free.’ The great man stood up and said, ‘Professor Coomaraswamy is greatly admired in this town, and it would be an honour to have dinner with him.’ I said, ‘Professor Coomaraswamy particularly wants you to host the dinner, sir.’ The Mills and Boon books had given me this language. Without Mills and Boon I couldn’t have done any of it. The great industrialist looked surprised but then said, ‘That would be an even greater honour.’ I said, ‘Thank you, sir,’ and almost ran out of the big house. On the day I put on my suit of pain and joy and took a taxi to my professor’s house. He said, ‘Ramachandra, this really gives me great pleasure. But why have you come in a taxi? Are we going far?’ I didn’t say anything, and we drove to the industrialist’s. My professor said, ‘This is a very grand house, Ramachandra.’ I said, ‘For you, sir, I want nothing but the best.’ I led him to the open verandah, where the industrialist and his wife and some other people were sitting, and then again I almost ran out of the house. The next day in the college my professor said, ‘Why did you kidnap me last night and take me to those people, Ramachandra? I didn’t know who they were, and they didn’t know anything about me.’ I said, ‘I am a poor man, sir. I can’t give someone like you dinner, and I wanted only the best for you.’ He said, ‘But, Ramachandra, my background is like yours. My family were just as poor as you.’ I said, ‘I made a mistake, sir.’ But I was full of shame. That was where that suit and Mills and Boon had taken me. I hated myself. I wanted to wipe out everyone who had witnessed my shame. I imagined the laughter of all those people in the verandah. I felt I couldn’t live in the world unless those people were dead. Unless my professor was dead. I have almost forgotten what they looked like, but that shame and anger is still with me.”

I said, “Little things drive people more than we sometimes imagine. I have so many causes of shame. In India, London and Africa. They are fresh after twenty years. I don’t think they will ever die. They will die only with me.”

Ramachandra said, “That is what I feel too.”

LATER THAT AFTERNOON a group of young men came out of the forest as the squad marched by. They had been waiting for the squad perhaps all day; time here was almost without value. And it was possible to tell from their bright faces and eager manner that these young men were potential recruits, young men imprisoned in their village and dreaming of breaking out: dreaming of the town and modern dress and modern amusements, dreaming of a world where time would have more meaning, dreaming perhaps also, the more spirited among them, of upheaval and power. Such groups had been attaching themselves to the squad at various stages of the march; their names and parentage and villages had been noted down. But this group of young men was different from others. These young men had news; their news made them frantic.

They sought out the man with the important gun, recognising him as the commander. Ramachandra and they talked. After a while Ramachandra signalled to the column to halt.

Ramachandra said, “They say there’s an ambush prepared for us higher up.”

Willie said, “Who?”

“It could be anybody. If it’s true. It could be the police. It could be Kandapalli’s supporters. It could be men hired by that big farmer who wants to buy the land from the old feudal. They would regard us as enemies. It could even be villagers who have become tired of having us in their villages and want now to get rid of us. They know we don’t mean business. It is part of the mess we are in here. Everybody feels the old world is changing and nobody can see a clear way ahead. We have thrown away our chance and now there are hundreds of causes. If we had proper military training we would know how to deal with an ambush. But we didn’t want to use guns. We just did the boy-scout and cadet stuff. Shouldering arms and presenting arms and standing at ease. That is all right if you are the only one with a gun. But now there is someone else with a gun, and I don’t know what to do. All I feel is that I should go forward and try to kill him. I can’t ask you to follow me since I don’t know what to do. If there is an ambush and something happens to me, you should go back on your tracks. Now make yourselves scarce.”

Willie said, “Ramachandra.”

“I have a good gun.”

They waited in that part of the forest until it was dark. Then one of the young men who had brought the news of the ambush called to them from the forest path.

“They killed him.”

“Who was it?”

“The police. He crept right up to them and sprayed them with his gun. He killed three. That gave him away, and they killed him. This will get into the papers, I tell you.”

Willie said, “He killed three?”

“Yes, sir.”

It was like good news, after all. Willie thought, “He honoured his name in the end. In the Indian epic, Ramachandra is the highest kind of man. He is much more than a religious man. You can depend on him in all circumstances to behave well, to do the right thing.”

The young man who had brought the news said, “Terrible for you, to lose a gun.”

Some time later — when (according to Ramachandra’s last order) they were going back on their tracks, staying off the main forest path, moving slowly in the darkness, determined to march all night if they had to, to get away from the police party, if the police were following — when they had been some time on this silent, half-blind march, Willie thought, “I didn’t think of the dead policemen. I’ve forgotten myself. Now I’m truly lost. In every way. I don’t know what lies ahead or behind. My only cause now is to survive, to get out of this.”